not be hard to arrange a very considerable
spiritual succession for him, by no means deserving the uncomplimentary
terms in which he dismisses his progeny in the flesh.

If there is an almost preposterous cheerfulness about _Buncle_, the
necessary alternative can be amply supplied by the next book to which we
come. The curious way in which Johnson almost invariably managed to hit
the critical nail on the head is well illustrated by his remark to
Frances Sheridan, author of the _Memoirs of Miss Sydney Bid[d]ulph_
(1761), that he "did not know whether she had a right, on moral
principles, to make her readers suffer so much." Substitute "aesthetic"
for "moral" and "heroine" for "readers," and the remark retains its
truth on another scheme of criticism, which Johnson was not ostensibly
employing, and which he might have violently denounced. The book, though
with its subsequent prolongation too long, is a powerful one: and though
actually dedicated to Richardson and no doubt consciously owing much to
his influence, practically clears off the debt by its own earnings. But
Miss Bidulph (she started with only one _d_, but acquired another),
whose journal to her beloved Cecilia supplies the matter and method of
the novel, is too persistently unlucky and ill-treated, without the
smallest fault of her own, for anything but really, not fictitiously,
real life. Her misfortunes spring from obeying her mother (but there was
neither moral nor satire in this then), and husbands, lovers, rivals,
relations, connections--everybody--conspire to afflict her. Poetical
justice has been much abused in both senses of that verb: _Sydney
Biddulph_ shows cause for it in the very act of neglect.

But the eighteenth century, on the whole, loathed melancholy. The
_Spiritual Quixote_ (1772) of the Reverend Richard Graves (1715-1804)
has probably been a little injured by the ingenuous proclamation of
indebtedness in the title. It is, however, an extremely clever and
amusing book: and one of the best of the many imitations of its
original, which, indeed, it follows only on broad and practically
independent lines. During his long life (for more than half a century of
which he was rector of Claverton near Bath) Graves knew many interesting
persons, from Shenstone and Whitefield (with both of whom he was at
Pembroke College, Oxford, though he afterwards became a fellow of All
Souls) to Malthus, who was a pupil of his; and he had some interesting
private e